I've Got the Idea to Become a Professor

The more I think about it, the more I want to become a professor.

I was talking with one of my former professors from Warren Wilson today, and he has slowly started to convince me to look more and more into grad school and the profession of teaching.

When I talk about teaching, I guess I should add this little caveat: I do not, under any circumstance, want to teach primary, secondary, or public school. There are way too many politics and regulations around that field that I have seen too many good souls get crushed by.

I want to influence the next generation of thinkers through post-secondary education. I want to teach young students (such as myself) not what to think, but rather how to think.

There is such value in knowledge. Knowing your context, geography, culture, is hugely important. But that information is mostly out there through the wonderful medium of the internet. What you cannot get through the internet (or at least yet) is the face to face instruction to personally influence people to start to think on how to process the huge amount of information out there.

As in computer science, the way our mind parses information is quintessential to where it goes, and what the output is:

If you learn that the only way to learn things is through simple facts and "big figure" concepts (I would argue the "traditional" way to learn), you lose the intricacies that make up the whole picture. You see the macro-forest.

But if you learn to learn things through the small lens, you end up with a micro-forest, losing the bigger picture of greater meaning, and how things tie across places.

Going to a more primal way to view things, there could even be the idea of providing that "intrinsic motivation" as my professor called it. The actual curiosity to learn and not sit idly by.

I've noticed that in my travels and my rough transition into the "real world" I've found that a lot of people are not very deep or inquisitive thinkers. I don't mean this as a "deep thinker" way of philosophy, but rather just as a general curiosity about life and how and why things work. It just seems like a lot of people don't have that "intrinsic motivation" inside them.

I like to teach that to people the best way I can. There is a finesse to it. I try not to seem like a jerk about it, but I like to throw questions back on people, and see if they can solve it first. When I worked on the GIS Crew at Warren Wilson, this was my ethic, and usually it worked. When it comes to tech, I love to point people to the direction of Google and the wonderful search box/omnibox.

But why do people not look to these places as their first option? Is it simply that I am available in physical "meetspace" for immediate help? Do people get lost in Wikipedia articles? How about libraries? Is that something that I just assumed people do?

I ponder these questions, and I come back to the metaphor of the computer processor:

The brain acts like a computer. It takes information and data in through the senses, processes it among the billions of neurons and synapses of the brain, and yields an output, in the form of a cognitive thought or a realization.

How do other people's processors work? Why do they work like that? Are there overarching systems we can see among these thought processes? Or is teaching something you just "do"?

And why does it seem like some people's processors are wired to simply accept what is in front of them, and not investigate, ask questions, or search for more? Where is their "intrinsic motivation"? Isn't that a key human trait? If it isn't, then what else do people live for?